shiplate farm west pool

only a small match today with 10 of us so the lake was full with all pegs taken , there were some road works in the lanes leading to the fishery with the lane from weston super mare being closed totally, so the only access was from the a38 side , so after a couple of phone calls kieth and shane turner arrived as did the bridgwater lothario in the shape of mike west, so draw under way and trig drew for me and gave me peg 4, he was on 5 and dean malin was on 3 and with the pegging being of a friendly nature it was going to be hard. just 2 rigs today , the bream and skimmer rig for the middle was a .6g affair which i later changed to a 4x14 with a 16 6313 on .12 and a 4x8 rig on .14 with the same hook for over to hopefully catch carp. the bream in this lake go to 8lb so they can make all the difference on the day. at the start everyone started in much the same way, feeding some softened pellets of various sizes down the middle and cupped some 4mm and micros with a bit of corn over , i thought cupping was the best option as the ducks would probably annoy me as they seem to be able to spot a catty at 1000mtrs and upend and eat your bait, dean next door fed with a catty and sure enough the feathered horrors arrived but at the end as we all know they upset us more than the fish. anyway everyone started getting skimmers and odd bream from the start but with it being flat calm this only lasted for about the first hour, then we all began struggling, craig(trig)edmunds on 5 put 2 balls of g bait in at 5 mtrs at the start and that paid off as he had 2 better dream and some skimmers over it during the day, so thats definately an option not to be ignored next time, it seemed you only got a couple of bites in one place then you would have to refeed and go to the other line, i did have 2 carp off the far side and a few good skimmers but the carp just seemed to be swimming through as i was getting odd liners, whereas dean on 3 ended up with 6 carp down mainly i think to him using the catty and making more noise and putting up with the ducks, by the end it was clear that the frampton legion stalwart kieth turner on peg 10 had probably done enough as he had 9 carp for what was going to be about 40lb with dean being closest with his carp and silvers mix.
the minor placings were up for grabs with jason radford having 2 late carp to put him in the mix ,and with me and trig both declaring that one had more than the other, with me thinking his 2 big bream foulhooked over his g bait making the difference.
as it turned out kieth turner was a popular winner with 43.3 of carp on corn to the end bank
2nd dean malin 36.8 peg 3
3rd jason radford 25.14 peg 8
4th tony rixon 23.11 peg 4
5th craig edmunds 23.8 peg 5 (you still have much to learn grasshopper, like the fish still have there mouths at the front oooh 3oz that hurts)
6th joe thompson 21lb peg 1